Are there certain people or specific events immediately preceding your work that inspired you to unveil your personal history in the method that you did: with the incorporation of factual interjection that reveals your mindfulness of the readers? If so, who or what were they?
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Hi Elissa. I had written drafts of the personal narrative during my time in graduate school, but I felt that the emotion of the narrative--my attempt to re-create the perspective of a child with ADHD, in a sense--was limiting and unchanging, for the reader, when stretched out to hundreds of pages. I considered a more radical structural approach--something less temporal and more hybridized, like Maxine Hong Kingston's brilliant WOMAN WARRIOR--but at the time I was reading Michael J Arlen's PASSAGE TO ARARAT, one of my favorite books, which is follows his rediscovery of his Armenian heritage while also braiding in a broader history of Armenia (both threads twine together at the WWI genocide), and I was also reading WG Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATURN, which contains very personal and moving moments of memoiristic narrative amid a general sea of historical background, and as a result, I decided to structure the book in its current form. It helped that the personal narrative was basically sketched out; that way, I could adhere the historical thread thematically--the first chapter is about causality, the second about treatment, the third about education, etc...--which freed me from a more chronological approach to relaying the past 100 years of study into psychiatry, psychology, and ADHD.
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